Rails and Ember without rails-api

This is a follow up to a post I wrote a couple months ago, “Ember and Rails Scaffolding for Simple Crud”. In that post, I gave an overview for how to generate simple CRUD scaffolding for an Ember app using Rails purely as an api through the rails-api gem.

Here’s the thing… if you take the api-only approach, you by design give up the ability to write standard Rails views. This can be a good thing, of course, which is why the gem was integrated into Rails 5. If all you want is an api, you don’t want the extra weight of everything else that comes with Rails, and you always can add various gems back in as needed. But for now, you may want to preserve the ability to write a full MVC rails app while still providing an API for Ember or other single page javascript frameworks.

Fortunately, this isn’t especially difficult. The Rails side will get a little more verbose, at least the way I’m writing it, but all you need to do is ensure that your app responds to both html and json – and of course be particularly careful to make sure that you don’t mix view logic with backend logic.

So, here we go…

First, create a full rails app with basic CRUD for the User model in the previous tutorial. I’m not going to repeat the steps here since they won’t change much. The only difference here is that instead of doing this with the rails-api gem and command, you’ll now do this with traditional rails. You will still need to create serializers, add rack/cors, allow access to various HTTP actions in the Rails app, and so forth. This is all available through the previous tutorial, with one change – you don’t need to install the rails-api gem, and wherever it says “rails-api generate…”, instead just use “rails generate…”.

You should now have a fully functional rails app for CRUD operations on a User that also provides json formatting as an api. The main difference between the api for a traditional Rails app and the rails-api generated app is that the traditional rails app responds by default as html, whereas rails-api responds as json. To get a json response from the traditional rails app, you will need to append “.json” to the url – in other words, to get the list of users rendered as json rather than displayed as html, you’d need to request:

http://localhost:3000/users.json

whereas the rails-api version doesn’t require this extension, as a rails-api app by default returns json (and wouldn’t normally respond as html at all).

On the Ember side, we need to instruct the adapter to specifically request json from the Rails app, as this is no longer the default Rails response.

To accomplish this, we will modify the Ember adapter in app/user/adapter.js

As you can see, this will append “.json” to all the requests send from Ember to Rails – even post, put, and delete requests , so you’ll need to explicitly handle the json format in any Rails controllers you intend to make available to Ember. As a result, we’ll need to modify the update and create methods in the Rails controller to specifically respond with json for Ember.

There is, inevitably, one more wrinkle – although Rails does respond by default to the “.json” extension, Ember expects a slightly different formatting, so you’ll need to make a few tweaks to get it working with Ember. Here’s the full controller code:

You may notice some additional code in create and update. This is because we need to respond as json for Ember, which we configured to submit all requests with the .json extension (even POST and PUT requests).

At this point, you can bring up both a Rails app on port 3000 and an Ember app on port 4200 and use both a standard Rails view and the Ember client for CRUD operations on your User model.

This does require some extra overhead, but it does keep open the possibility of writing a traditional Rails app while providing an API for not just Ember but any other app that might want to consume a Rails API.